Nothing Is Terrible (26 page)

Nietzschean fashion model Ruella Forecourt arrived not long after with her husband, Joe Samuels. Joe, usually chatty, seemed cowed that afternoon. Ruella spoke a great deal, the heaviness of her Swiss-German accent advancing and retreating with the passion of her feelings on a given subject. She told us the story about the day Friedrich Nietzsche saw a man whipping his little dray horse too often and too hard on a street outside his apartment in Turin. Nietzsche ran out into the street and embraced the forlorn, bleeding horse about the neck, and the horse began speaking to Nietzsche in fluent German. At this point, Nietzsche crossed the invisible border between philosophy and madness,
without a return ticket
, as Ruella put it. On the afternoon when Ruella visited us, I felt that she existed to embody the topic of conversation between Nietzsche and the horse.

“Oh, darlings,” she said, “the light in here is perfectly lurid.”

“Lurid,” Joe agreed, nodding vigorously.

“I would love to shoot stills of you in situ. The little Siamese
twins. Of course you would have to be naked, and my dear boy you would have to grab her here like so.”

“I don’t grab her there,” Mittler said.

“We don’t ever get naked,” I said.

“Why my dears, could you possibly mean that you two do not enjoy sexual congress?”

“Congress, the executive and judicial branches,” I said.

“But you must let me shoot nudes of you.”

“No nudes,” we said.

“I have of course told you about my pornography project?” she said. “I intend to assemble a complete visual typology of dominant and submissive sexual positions for women. Of those positions I will then create a sign language on the model of the American Sign Language for the deaf. Either a given position will be assigned an arbitrary letter value—for example,
woman sits backward on supine man’s penis
will be the letter
a
—or a position will function as an ideogram—for example,
woman reclining alone, legs casually spread, bracing herself on her elbows, gently touching the sides of her own hips
would represent
water
or
peace
. Once I have created my Alphabet of Female Sexual Positions, I will then write feminist treatises using this alphabet, and I hope others will do so as well. And that is my project and you are lovely children that I would like to include in your peculiar tent.”

“Nope,” we said.

“I’m financing the project,” Joe said proudly. That was Joe’s first feckless chink in Ruella’s wall of speech.

I said, “No hard documentation, please.”

“Or soft,” Mittler said. “How much does the project cost?” he asked Joe.

“Much more than you’d think,” Joe said, “and she’s reaping all the profit.”

“How come?”

“Because I love her.”

“Also because Joseph and I agree that I must not be subjugated by him. Yes, because you see the white man may subjugate the African-American man and the white man may subjugate the indigenous American man and the white man may subjugate the South American man and the white man may subjugate the Caribbean man and the white man may subjugate the Chinese man and the white man may subjugate the European man but—oh, darling, who is that thin boy I am thinking of?”

Joe said, “How the hell should I know, dear?”

“Dear, you mustn’t say ‘hell’ to me. The thin lovely martyr boy, the one who said the beautiful thing I want to tell the children.”

“John Lennon,” Joe said.

“Yes, children, the white man may subjugate all the other men and even himself but you see the little fellow John Lennon who died so dreadfully also said to us that the woman is the nigger of the world,” a phrase which in Ruella’s mouth sounded like
Deh voomon eess deh neegah uff de veldt
. “One must at all costs avoid to be subjugated,” she said.

Mittler said, “But you’re subjugating Joe.”

“No, darling, I am
using
Joe.”

“That’s worse.”

“Oh, no, darling, it is better. It is good to use, and even more so, it is good to be used. I myself wake up in the morning and I cannot wait for the first person to use me today. Oh, it is
beautiful to be used
and
it is fun to be used. In the woman’s life it is the supreme achievement to be used and the man must learn to honor the woman by using her properly. The man also must learn to be used by the woman and to enjoy it because it is lovely. For me personally I am sometimes so impatient for someone to use me that I give up waiting and use myself.”

Mildred, the girlfriend of Chetty, who when her feathers were not too ruffled behaved like a mother hen, had been hen enough one day to shoplift a pair of flexible narrow-necked toothbrushes and bring them back to us at the roost. That night, Mittler and I carried the new toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste into a small room where a smooth white porcelain bowl of water rested on the floor. Above the porcelain bowl, Mittler and I stood side by side, as much as that was possible. First I and then Mittler squeezed the tube and laid the bright green toothpaste down along the tops of the bristles of our toothbrushes. We angled our heads away from each other as far as we could without hurting ourselves, and opened our mouths wide. Our two mouths, connected and opened as they were, resembled a symbol for infinity in which the two adjacent loops were filled in with black ink. We brushed. While brushing, Mittler brought up the topic of, “Is this working out for you?”

“Is what working out?”

“Our arrangement.”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“Think about it.”

“Okay.”

“No, I mean right now.”

“I just did.”

“And?”

“I’m saying, it’s okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Well, it’s nice. It’s fun. I mean I think sometime I’ll want to, you know, go outside again, go for a run, ride a bus. I’ve been thinking of getting a dog,” I said, shoving the bristles back and forth along the tops of my lower right molars.

“I don’t want you to buy a dog. People with dogs are liars. Like the person will trip on the sidewalk and blame it on the dog.”

“How about ride a bus?”

“What about how nicely we’re attached to each other?”

“I just said, it’s fun.”

“But I want to always be this way with you.”

“Literally?”

“Yeah, I think so. Do you?”

We rinsed and spat.

“Sure,” I said. “I guess.”

Harry returned to the tent at noon one day. He had Hoving Harrington Hartman in his hands. “He wanted to see you,” Harry said.

“This revolting Cyclops brought me here against my will,” Hoving said.

Harry placed the little man in the center of the tent and left. Hoving had shrunken since I saw him, and his stained and wrinkled black wool coat brushed against the floor of the tent. The sky outside the building outside the tent was clear. The sun, because this was winter in lower Manhattan, occupied the area of the sky south of Houston Street and shone directly
through the window outside our tent, making the tent walls especially orange and bright. “I’m in Hell,” Hoving said in a voice that was a high-pitched, cracked variation of the voice of the woman I loved most in the world. “I had often wondered if this would happen. I tried to be decent in all my individual dealings with people. I did not ever behave in a lascivious manner in my private gynecological practice, though on several occasions I was quite tempted to do so. While it is true that the proto-intrauterine device that I invented caused severe health complications in some of the women who used it, it is also true that I neither intended nor foresaw those complications and, furthermore, that each woman who sued received a substantial out-of-court settlement. Should I have sold all my stock shares in my own invention and given away not only all of my proceeds but all of the proceeds of my proceeds? Apparently so. Ah, my legs ache, just as in life. I suppose I should not be surprised that Hell is a continuation of old age in perpetuity.”

“You’re not in Hell, you’re in the East Village,” we said.

I said, “Look, Grandpa, it’s me.”

Hoving squinted at us. “Is that my darling grandchild? But my dear, I am confused. You were kind to me on earth. Why are you in Hell? You treated me gently and reminded me of my mama. Has someone killed you?”

“Shut up, Grandpa, you’re scaring me.”

“Oh, yes, now I remember. You’re an insolent creep. I’m glad you’re dead.”

Mittler said, “Please have a seat, sir. I’ll fix you some tea.”

Hoving stared at Mittler and said to me, “My precious, who is this falsely polite little gargoyle you’ve extruded from your face?”

“That’s Mittler. You’ve met him, remember?”

“I remember nothing. My grandchild, if you are the Devil and you have made yourself a two-headed monster to scare me, cut it out.”

Mittler said, “Do you think Harry gave him a hit of acid?”

“No, he’s just paranoid and senile, which is kind of the same as being on LSD except when you come down, you’re dead.”

Hoving became frantic and leapt at us and tried to pull our heads apart, but we were stronger and had often practiced how to keep them together in such an event. We each used a hand to restrain Hoving, while using the other to stabilize our heads. “I’m hungry,” Hoving said.

“We’ll have to give him beef jerky,” I said.

Hoving said, “I adore beef jerky.”

Hoving sat on the floor of the tent with his legs splayed out in front of him, nibbling on the tip of the beef stick. He gazed at nothing. An invisible hood seemed to have descended over his eyes. He had that pouty, almost catatonically blank look of contentment that five-year-olds get after they’ve cried a long time and then been appeased with food. Though his body had shrunken, his face had remained the same size, which made it look huge. It was tinted orange in the tent-filtered sunlight. His eyebrows were thick and pale. His forehead was so tall and featured with wrinkles that the total front of his head looked like two faces, one on top of the other.

Mittler said, “How old is he anyway?”

“Ninety,” Hoving said dreamily.

“Don’t believe him,” I said. “He has no idea how old he is.”

Hoving looked at me. “I know exactly how old I am. You think because I am frightened of damnation that I am not in my right mind. Well, let me tell you something, girlie. This boy
is wasting his love on you, and he knows it, and he should snap out of it, and so should you. You belong with my daughter. Instead, you left her, fool.”

“She kicked me out! On Christmas Eve!”

“That is crap. You kicked yourself out. Thank you for the beef jerky.” Hoving stood up and left the tent.

To be seventeen and eating LSD every day for three months in a filthy squat in New York City while stapled to your boyfriend’s face is to be seventeen. Eventually, one must either die or turn eighteen. The latter befell me.

The following morning I woke up at three o’clock, which is generally the time of day when a person sneaks away from the one who loves her beyond reason. I unclasped the lip ring, slid it up out of my lip, and clasped it again, leaving it inside Mittler. I stood up slowly. This was like being released from the gravitational field of the planet you’ve been living on for three months. I thought I would rise up into the air and dissipate like a cloud. I hugged myself for a few minutes while staring at Mittler, who did not wake up. To weigh myself down, I put on all the clothes I had arrived in, though the weather was much warmer now than it had been then. Already wearing my own black wool overcoat, I put on Mittler’s puffy, hooded down jacket that resembled a dark blue space suit, which I thought would help protect me from the thin air beyond the immediate atmosphere of him. I started out of the tent and then, reader, I did something I would not have done when I was seventeen: I thought of how much he would miss his jacket, and took it off. I have long understood that it is not nice to be cruel, but I am still learning how to tell the difference between nice behavior and cruel behavior.

I started out of the tent again and remembered the $10,000 in hundreds I had stashed in one of the blanket rolls shortly after my arrival. I checked the blanket roll and found nothing. I went down the hall to the room where Mildred and Chetty were sleeping, woke Chetty, and asked him for the money.

Chetty said, “Oh, sorry, we bought a motorcycle with most of it and spent the rest on nice clothes and fancy dinners. I’ve got twenty bucks I could give you.”

“Okay.”

He gave me two dirty little tens. I floated down the stairs and out into the world.

Listen: after detaching myself from that boy, I wandered Manhattan and the Bronx for hours and hours. I wanted to go home, and when I spoke the word
home
to myself, I pictured my bedroom with the white comforter and the large French windows; I pictured Skip Hartman standing with her back to me, looking out the French windows. I wanted to go home to Skip Hartman. She was the one I loved most. Mittler may have been the gentler soul, but Ms. Hartman, who owned me, knew how to tolerate my fierce separateness. She knew how to tolerate my hatred of her. My hatred helped her; we understood that about each other. The one thing that she did not know how to tolerate in me was my wish to be with Mittler. I had now succeeded in exhausting that wish.

I wondered if I could return to her. I pictured her standing with her back to me, looking out the French windows. The question was, Does she turn around or does she not turn around? Does she turn around?
Once you have left
, she had said on Christmas Eve,
do not come back
. She does not turn around. I could not return to her.

Nor could I now, with twenty dollars in my pocket, check into a hotel.

Several hours after nightfall, I boarded a train and rode it to Verdant, New York. The Verdant train station, which also serves Marmot, is a place you can look at late at night and think of all the nice things that happen there, if you are inclined to think that way. I mean that you could get off the train and watch the three other passengers climb into their cars and drive away, and then you could stand by yourself in the dark, desolate little parking lot and—if you are of a certain cast of mind—you could mentally populate that parking lot with families of children greeting their dads as the dads arrive from the city after a day of work in a clean office, and you could imagine a lot of good cheer imbuing such a reunion, which happens every fucking evening.